Giving direction

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It is easy for companies to recognise the importance of leadership,
but much more difficult for them to foster it. Janine Milne finds
out how it is done

Jamie Oliver has it, so does Richard Branson. Margaret Thatcher
had it, but then lost it spectacularly. They share little in common
except for one important thing: they all possess the leadership
X-Factor.

Effective leadership can mean the difference between a business
flourishing or floundering. But while it is easy to see where
leadership can go horribly David Brent-style wrong, it is much
harder to define what makes a good leader and even harder to go
about shifting corporate culture to encourage leadership at all
levels.

For while leadership must come from the top, a Richard
Branson-type figurehead will still need strong leaders throughout
the company to be successful.

Mark Wilkinson, head of IT solutions at information giant
LexisNexis, recognised that bringing leadership skills to the fore
throughout his department was key to delivering the new IT
strategy. He wanted to create a culture where all members of staff
took ownership and responsibility for their work and encourage a
think-beyond-the-payslip mentality.

Ownership issues
"I knew I didnt have enough ownership in my team or know how
to fix it, thats why I went to Attiva," he says. Business
performance training company Attiva devised a two-day leadership
course for Wilkinson and other levels of people throughout the
department. "All leadership books are about CEOs, so to try and
bring leadership down to everyone in the organisation is
fantastic," adds Wilkinson.

Everyone took away three key messages from the course: the
importance of relationships, communication and ownership. "It was
taken down to all the silos that existed and taught me last year
how important relationships are. It makes it so much easier to
accomplish things," he says.

Opening up the lines of communication and a greater awareness of
strategic goals, helped the department become 16 per cent more
productive. Now other parts of the business are geared up to take
the same course. The key to successful leadership at all levels is
tapping into peoples enthusiasm, says Wilkinson.

Tapping into passion "A leader is someone who can bring
everyones passion out - passion drives everything, "believes
Wilkinson. "When youre passionate about something like a
hobby, it really shows. If you can get that same passion at work,
thats great."

Insurance company Hiscox puts new employees through a course on
personal presentation from management development company Jo
Ouston. Hiscox is small and entrepreneurial and it is part of
everyones job description to constantly question and not
accept the status quo. The course helped Ian Holt, who is head of
business and analysis and responsible for IT, to adjust to this
leadership-driven company.

"Everyone here is very entrepreneurial and open and has ideas on
how to make the business more of a success," says Holt. Creating
such dramatic cultural change is the pot of gold for organisations.
But it seems that many companies are not really as committed to
promoting change as they profess.

Corporate apathy According to a January 2005 report, Leadership
Development in European Organisations: Change and Best Practice,
from leadership development organisation DIEU, nearly half the
European companies surveyed fail to integrate their leadership
development with business needs.

It finds that less than a quarter of boardrooms are fully
committed to their companies goals of leadership development
and there is no sign of them upping their investment in
leadership.

But results take investment: both personally and professionally.
"Training is very important and you have to start early," says
David McKean, UK IT director at Cable & Wireless.

"I did a sales course early on and it completely re-calibrated
my brain - it was the first bit of leadership training I went
on."

And training can be important to help you understand yourself
better, by promoting some much needed navel gazing. "The more you
know about yourself, the better leader you are," says Wilkinson at
LexisNexis. But it is nonsense to think you can go on a one day
course and be transformed into leader. It is a work in progress.
"Its about you as an individual, your experiences, your
formal development - your managers and leaders in your business,"
expands McKean.

Natural talent
While leadership skills can be taught, it helps to have some
natural leadership ability. "Its the old nature versus
nurture debate, but as always in life, its both. You can have
enormous natural skill, but theres no doubt that you become
much more effective when you build on that," contends ex-BP CIO
John Cross, now a non-executive director of ServiceTec.

For Cross, the traditional Hollywood and media ideal of a strong
leader is very far removed from what is needed in todays
businesses. "The Hollywood heroes to me are just keen to promote
themselves and those are the ones I worry about. The really good
guys have no need to do that: Bill Gates for example. Hes a
great leader who has the ability to surround himself with good
people."

Gates is more geek than charismatic, but he finds people with
complementary skills to surround him. He recognises his strengths
and weaknesses. In the same way it could be argued that Margaret
Thatcher was a successful leader when she had Willie Whitelaw to
curb her excesses, but did less well when Norman Tebbit became her
chief sounding board. It is rare to get all the leadership skills
you need in one person. Leadership strength comes from
self-assurance, but not arrogance.

"Ive seen my share of arrogant leaders," recalls Cross.
"My great leaders are John Browne [CEO of BP] and Jack Welch at GE.
What they both had in common is that they are very
self-effacing."

Restrained leadership His experience chimes with the theory from
leadership experts. The qualities that most people admire in a
leader are not charisma or strength.

"Interviews with CEOs at Fortune 500 companies found the
differentiating factor of those who made it to CEO was empathy and
the ability to work in a team. But the biggest factor was
self-control," says Gordon Mackenzie, a director at training
consultancy Performance First. A good manager is consistent, they
do not fly off the wall one day and act all sweetness and light the
next.

"If you look at research, the biggest reason why people leave
companies is their relationship with their manager; the biggest
cause of stress is the relationship with their line manager and the
biggest cause of absenteeism is the climate create by the line
manager," says Mackenzie. No matter how good the CEO or CIO is, you
need good leaders and managers all the way down the food chain.

Feminine management Increasingly those leaders and managers are
female. "Were beginning to see the feminisation of
leadership," says Steve Kempster, director of leadership
development at Lancaster University Management School. Partly that
is because we are seeing an influx of women in management - women
do better at school and university and are seen to have the right
repertoire of personal skills: they are good at multitasking,
forming relationships and negotiating, and they do not tend to let
ego get in the way. As they progress up the management scale, they
become role models for the next-generation. But just as Maggie
Thatcher was quite male in her leadership style, todays
feminine leader is embodied by male chef Jamie
Oliver.

Training company Video Arts has taken Jamie Oliver and his
television programme Jamies Kitchen as the inspiration for
leadership and teamwork courses. In the programme, Oliver took a
group of unemployed kitchen no-hopers and moulded them into an
efficient kitchen crew capable of running a top restaurant,
Fifteen.

The way he turned them around - with his clear vision, passion
and inclusive rather than bossy attitude - encapsulates the skills
needed to succeed in business "At first you see him as a man
dominating the kitchen, but when you size it up, it actually shows
a new generation perspective on leadership," suggests Kempster.

Personal clarity
But having the right personality traits will not be enough to see
you through. You also need the drive to realise that vision and you
need to understand your industry and be able to set realistic
business objectives. "The best organisations we work with are those
who have a real focus on performance, real clear goals and
processes. Set goals, rules and processes, then the relationships
will follow. Its not relationships first. You need clarity
first and relationships will come," says Mackenzie.

Cross agrees it is a combination of business experience and
personal leadership style that wins followers. "They need the
capacity to set new objectives and to have a profound understanding
of organisational processes and whats required to make people
follow you," he says. "I would say a leader has to exhibit the
capacity to see a future vision. Of course, someone may see the
wrong vision. Its all very well for a general to march to the
top of a mountain, but what if its the wrong one? Its
all about strategic vision and that has to come from people who
grasp the fundamentals of the industry they are in. A true leader
changes the organisation - and keeps on doing that. They have to
reinvigorate the business over time as the market keeps on
changing."

Creating caretakers Cross is describing what the academics call
transformational leaders, who have true entrepreneurial vision and
determination to keep reinventing the business. But there is
another kind of leader: a transactional leader, who is concerned
with getting a job done. They give orders and keep records and
follow systems - they fit the mould of managers, rather than
leaders. It is possible to train transactional managers, but
transformational managers are far more of a rare breed - they need
that X-Factor.

Of course, companies need both sorts of people, but our
education system, contends Mackenzie, is creating a nation of
transactional rather than transformational leaders. "School and
university teaches us to conform and accept and regurgitate
knowledge, but it doesnt actually teach us to lead," says
Mackenzie.

That is why a disproportionate amount of people who opt out of
formal education prove to be very entrepreneurial. So too do
dyslexics. The illustrious roll call includes Winston Churchill,
Albert Einstein and John F Kennedy, because they had to think
creatively around problems and to ignore established rules.

As Mackenzie points out: "Someone whos dyslexic or wants
to get on will question the point of learning about quadratic
equations."

So if the education system is letting us down, what can we do
about it? Ken Lewis was so shocked by the lack of leadership
potential he found when recruiting for the company he founded,
Dutton Engineering, that he decided to take action at the source
and go back to school.

He set up a scheme where troublemaker teenagers, who were
intelligent but determined to buck the system, would come and work
a day a week at the firm and be mentored by one of his staff.
"Ive always recruited on attitude and aptitude, not
qualifications," he says. One of those youngsters has joined the
company full-time and is being fast-tracked to greater things.

Learned behaviour The educational system and parents can do more
to help create the next-generation of leaders simply by encouraging
the right behaviour. "We learn leadership through the sets of
experience we go through. The more we value leadership and the more
you begin to identify with leadership, the more you tend to spot
it," says Kempster.

So, for example, a kid that plays football like Wayne Rooney
might be made captain. If someone then keeps telling them they are
doing a fantastic job as captain, they will start to believe in
themselves. "Leaders are the result of experience, so the quicker
and earlier people can gain life experience, the more likely they
are to step up to the mark. They get over their fear," says
Mackenzie. And being a transformation leader is a scary business;
it demands risk-taking.

Being a leader in IT is a special case, however. IT is a
stickler for rules and systems - it is the nature of the job. If
you do not keep within boundaries, you are not going to create
software or systems that meet business requirements.

Unfortunately, that kind of thinking does not necessarily sit
easily with the risk-taking, rule-breaking style of
transformational leadership.

Quest for perfection
"One of the hardest things I had to do was creating high-quality
leaders out of IT people," says Cross. "There is an emphasis in IT
on perfection that simply doesnt exist in the business
world."

In business you fail and learn. In IT, you strive for
perfection. But someone with only business expertise cannot easily
fill the CIO shoes. "Generalists dont survive either," adds
Cross. "If they fail to understand the strategic technology agenda,
they will fail. Youve got to be capable of understanding the
technology market, while be firmly centred on the business.

In BP, I worked hard trying to ensure cross-fertilisation with
the business. Recognising leaders when theyre in senior IT
management is almost too late. Many will be too senior to be
accepted in another part of the business."

There is no magic key that unlocks the door to successful
leadership. It takes a mixture of innate talent, experience and
training, as well as a hefty dollop of personal knowledge to
succeed. But the one place to start is to love what you do.

"People who are managing and leading in the entrepreneurial
sense - their passion comes across. Enjoyment has a huge impact,"
says Mackenzie.